Romantic Irish Houses is a beautiful hardback book by Robert O’Byrne with photography by Simon Brown. The book has three sections: farmhouses, homes for gentry, and “the big house”. There is no sense of the ‘museum quality’ that you might see in similar books of dwellings from other countries. Here it looks as if the owners had just stepped out for a turn in the garden while the photographer slipped in and took the pictures of the rooms and halls exactly as they had left them. ‘Taking a turn in the garden’ is a euphemism for a lover’s tryst in Jane Austin speak – and so in keeping with the romantic mood, in fact one of these houses was used as Jane Austin’s house in the movie Becoming Jane. I’m sure there are set-ups in this book but they don’t appear as such and as a result everything looks natural and a little distressed. There are some very interesting facts about Irish interiors that O’Byrne sprinkles throughout the text that make it a very interesting read as well as beautiful to leaf through.

What’s great about this book is that it looks at farmhouses as well as the manor houses and castles. Romance can obviously happen anywhere. I did read in one review that the layout was thought to be too much like a magazine and too many fonts were used. I have to disagree – the design by Paul Tilby works very well.

The fact that the book is called Romantic Irish Homes rather than Romantic Irish Houses – is important – as all of these houses are very much homes and are lived in now, as they have been lived in hundreds of years ago.

Published by Cico Books, it can be bought for 30 euro directly from the Irish Georgian Society website.